Freelance Writing Roundup

Everyone once in a while I do a round up of what's going on in my corner of freelance writing. Since I am a Web writer and PR specialist, it is inevitably pathetic, but here what's been going on this month so far:

I started with Break Studios. I don't know if they hire outside the U.S., but anything I can do to keep from relying on Demand I will do. The pay is about the same as DS but the hassle factor is supposed to be better. We'll see. You can only grab five articles at a time from them instead of the 20 that I can with Demand, and I did five one night just to see how it will go. It seems like a long lag time for review, but if the hassle level is low, I'm sold.

Went on Atkins. Lost 14 pounds.

Dealt with two horrible, national-news-headline shootings, both within minutes from my house and avoided writing bad poetry about my cynicism and distrust of people. Yay me!

Worked on my book about gardening that is under contract with Atlantic Publishing. The contract isn't great, but it's a print book that will likely be a nice little resume booster. It's been an interesting experience working with them, and I am enjoying working on such an enormous project instead of my usual 500-word bites of knowledge.

Worked super hard on a press release that is so specialized and technical that I have to call engineer relatives every five minutes to figure out how to proceed with different aspects of it. On the bright side, my PR efforts yielded articles in both Popular Mechanics and Design World this month.

Had a query turned down by Dog Fancy. Growl.


On another note, it's Valentine's Day, or it was a couple of hours ago. I am a creature of habit and of odd, drunken fascinations with geeky things. I write all the time, sometimes 12 hours a day, and take little interest in other things. Despite this, I have a spouse who understands it and even supports it all. Happy Valentine's Day, spouse. You are a special person for dealing with all of the idiosyncrasies and weirdness without complaining. When I told you I got in a fight at the Sam's Club last week, you didn't bat an eyelash. Thanks for being as understanding as you are.

WTH

I got home from an errand a little while ago, and heard an enormous chorus of police cars when I got out of the car. The last time I heard so many sirens a policeman had been shot, so I was a little concerned about what might be going on. Maybe it was just an accident nearby? Maybe it was a robbery? No dice.

The local university was attacked by a shooter, possibly two shooters, and at least six people were shot. Three have died and several are pretty bad off. That's bad enough- to happen so close to where I live and to have the community rocked by yet another shooting (last week it was a school 15 minutes from me).

But, this particular building is where my spouse attends courses. He was not there at the time, luckily. The campus has always felt pretty safe to me. I have taken courses there before, and I go to regular events there. It's unbelievable that this would happen here- and it's not even some over-stressed student who lost it. A professor? At UAH? I don't understand any of this.


And btw- no student alerts were sent out. There was no student notification of any kind, even when the campus was on lock down. Spouse and friend of spouse, both of whom attend courses in the building, got no email, no text and no phone call. Great job, UAH.

Update: 2+ hours after the shootings, the emails are just now being received.

Update: Amy Bishop. From news reports, no implications, no malice. Just information.

DS and Frustration

If you write for Demand Studios, you know the good and the bad. They are flexible, you can have as much work as you want and the pay is pretty good. They have a lot of types of titles to choose from, and they pay often. However, the frustration level when you deal with them can absolutely and without question drive you over the edge. I often have to take a month or two away from them and do client work because I can't take the frustration level for very long.

If you work for them or have been thinking about it, this is all you need to see:




It's like someone opened a window into my soul.

Salinger and Seclusion

I was pretty surprised to find out that Salinger was 91. I've always admired him for his reclusive tendencies, probably because that's kind of my ideal life. I've always wanted to be able to write and not deal with very many people. The reality is that to be able to make a living by writing, the work has to be out there for public consumption and it has to be something that will attract readers. But when they do read in large numbers, I get a little squirmy. I can't imagine things on the scale of Salinger's readers and critics.

If I even have a day when the blog has a lot of viewers, I immediately know that there is a link somewhere that is pointing people to the idiot who is talking such nonsense. Imagine someone of Salinger's caliber attempting to deal with not only his legions of fans but the literary critics and people who wanted desperately to find something wrong with his work so that they could feel important. Yeah, I think his lifestyle made perfect sense.

I actually read this article about a week before Salinger died. Most of them have good reasons to avoid a constant onslaught of critics trying to make a name for themselves by picking them apart.

Product Testing, Free Stuff and Blogging

Ok, so I had mentioned a few weeks ago the new FTC ruling about blogging and product promotion. Ever since then, I always look for the disclosures on blogs. Some of them have them on posts when they are reviewing an item and some of them have a general page that says that some product opinions are the result of a free product to test, which seems to meet the guidelines of disclosure.

The interesting part is that some bloggers are saying exactly where the got the items from, which led me to MyBlogSpark. One blog that I read frequently disclosed that a product had come to them through MyBlogSpark, and I have a blog, so I thought- hey, why have I not tried to do this? So, I signed up, and pretty rapidly I got an email saying that they had a General Mills cereal thing going on, and did I want a bunch of cereal to test.

So that led to one thought- Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Next to C-3POs and Smurfberries, which they don't actually make anymore, Cinnamon Toast Crunch is one of the best cereals ever made. So, testing CTC was no problem whatsoever. I actually got several coupons for the really big cereal boxes- not the tiny ones that they keep on the bottom shelf- from General Mills through MyBlogSpark. And yes, they were tasty. And yes, I probably ate too many of them because there were four giant boxes full of CTC sitting there staring at me.

So, the real question then is how to blog about them. Do I just do a review about the cereal? That's not really my style unless it's a review article. Do I just talk about getting free items? That's probably not what they had in mind. Do I just talk about disclosure and then disclose that I got some stuff? That's really has nothing to do with the thing that I was reviewing. So, I figured some type of hybrid was pretty much what I can do. I hope you liked it.

Two Years

I seriously want to take in a Haitian orphan. I don't know how to go about doing it. I found out that I do meet the legal requirements, but I don't think they are being taken out of the country at the moment. It seems like if they could airlift them out, a lot of people would be willing to adopt then and there. Here's info on adopting from Haiti. According to that, it can take two years to complete the whole red-tape process. It seems like a crime to make them wait so long. Surely they will change this in the wake of what's happened? It would be easy to airlift kids to Florida, I could be there in a few hours and then we'd go home. How do lawyers and politicians succeed in making everything so much more complicated than it should be?

What is a Managing Editor?

I've seen a lot of speculation about just what a managing editor is, some of whom attribute all kinds of responsibilities to that title. In truth, however, there is no one job description for a managing editor. I worked for a paper that utilized a a managing editor as a reporter who also helped other reporters with questions. It wasn't a very big elevation of responsibility, but it was useful to have someone to go with questions besides the busy editor.

At another paper, the managing editor served as the editor and handled everything that an editor in chief is supposed to do. The title of editor was given to the paper's owner, though he rarely had anything to do with the actual content and I wonder whether he even read it most days.

While a managing editor is fairly prestigious in that land where there is air and sunlight, I keep finding that managing editors are pretty low-level editors on the Internet. They are often just over-worked editors with little responsibility within the actual publication. Then I came across the term contributing editor at a site that I'm starting with. Maybe it's just me, but that seems a little odd. Either you're an editor or you aren't. If you're a contributor, why are you editing? I thought editors were people who couldn't write and so take out their venom on people who can?

Maybe there's a need for new online titles for editors who also write, editors who actually do have some control over the publication and editors who have a need for an important title to compensate for what is lacking in their lives. How about God-complex editor, editor-not-in-chief-because-the-title-is-meaningless and editor-until-someone-will-pay-me-to-write.